


Yours

by gnimmish



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-29 18:31:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15735042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnimmish/pseuds/gnimmish
Summary: “Mr Scarmander must be awfully keen to stay in touch considering that he has to have sent this from the steamer,” Queenie’s far too cheerful for this time in the morning. Tina blindly reaches for the coffee and resists the urge to snatch the letter out of her sister’s hand.Not long after the events of Fantastic Beasts, Tina receives a missive from a certain magizoologist. Everything about it confuses her.





	Yours

**Author's Note:**

> It's Tina Goldstein's birthday, so here's something fluffy for everyone's favourite awkward auror.

 

“Teenie, you got a letter,” her sister is at the stove, making coffee (…supervising the coffee, which is making itself), her voice sing-songing over the sound of some godawful wireless drama, the envelope held out between two fingers.

Tina has only just got out of the wash room, her hair still damp and not yet combed. She’s wrestling with the buttons on the damned silk blouse she bought specially after her reinstatement, which she could swear regularly does itself up wrong on purpose, and she’s thinking about how she’s going to be so, so late if she doesn’t leave the apartment right this minute. She heard the owl arrive with their mail already and Queenie knows she never has time to open letters in the morning anyway, so why is she looking so smug –

Then she recognises the neat cursive script on the envelope’s address.

“Mr Scarmander must be awfully keen to stay in touch considering that he has to have sent this from the steamer,” Queenie’s too cheerful for this time in the morning. Tina blindly reaches for the coffee and resists the urge to snatch the letter out of her sister’s hand.

“Don’t make it seem so lascivious,” she mutters, and only gets one of Queenie’s wide-eyed, dimpled grins in return.

“I ain’t the one making it lascivious, Teenie, I know what pops in your head when you think about that nice young man –  you’d make him blush –”

“Would you stop reading my mind – ” they’ve talked about those kind of boundaries before, not that Queenie’s ever had much compunction to stick to them. Tina focuses on swallowing scalding hot coffee – she’s late, she’s so late – and nothing pops in her head when she thinks about Newt, really – nothing bad – nothing – _that bad_ anyway –

“You’re not gonna be late, you’re just perfectly on time – and it’d be easier to stay out’a your great dumb head if you weren’t telegraphing _lasciviousness_ all the live long day – you’re repressed, honey, that’s your problem, if you let loose once in a while you’d be much harder to read – ”

Tina snatches Newt’s letter from her sister’s fingers, stuffs it into a pocket and hurries for the door, struggling into her shoes as she goes.  

“Hey, you ain’t had breakfast!”

“I’m late!”

Queenie tosses a flap of raw pastry dough into the air and it comes down a fresh, hot Danish, which she thrusts into Tina’s mouth as she’s wrestling her coat on – promptly gets her wand caught in its sleeve and has to go digging. “Have a good day, sweetie.”

“Ank-kyoo,” Tina manages, around the pastry, frees her wand at last, lets Queenie peck her on the cheek goodbye, and apparates onto the street below.

She’d like to say that she managed to resist Newt’s letter until the end of the day, or at least an appropriate moment during her lunch break – maybe even her mid-morning coffee break.

But in truth she manages to wait a grand total of ten minutes after she makes it to her desk before she can’t stand it any longer.

Besides, Queenie will be arriving in the building to start her own working day three floors below, and frankly Tina doesn’t want her sister close enough by that she’ll catch any of her reaction. If she has any reaction. She has no idea what Newt might have written or what she’ll feel about it – she’s being ridiculous.

She sets the envelope, slightly creased now, in front of her at her desk and forces herself to observe it calmly and rationally, the way she would a key piece of evidence or an important witness to a crime.

A small envelope, not broad but quite thick, suggesting more than one piece of paper folded up inside. Edges bent, from being in her pocket. Faint scratches from where the owl must have held it. A red wax ceil, stamped not with Newt’s initials but with a little crest of some kind – a badger. The English kind. Maybe it’s his favourite non-magical creature. That would be very like Newt. Or – isn’t there a Hogwarts house with a badger mascot? She’ll have to look that up.

Her name and address are neat and pretty in Newt’s delicate, spider-y hand, which she remembers vividly from leafing through his manuscript and notes. The ink isn’t blue, as it had appeared on first sight, but very deep purple – and if she holds it up to the light, it’s faintly iridescent. There are two blots, suggesting a new quill, the nib still somewhat stiff – and the edge of a thumb print, smeared in the same iridescent indigo, on the opposite side to her name.

And the envelope smells like his suitcase.

Tina turns it over once, twice more – she’s not nervous, she refuses to be nervous – glances around the shared office space, feeling furtive – but everyone is busily going about their own days, uninterested in her (…not an unusual state of affairs). She has an absurd impulse to lock herself in the ladies bathroom down the hall to open the damn thing there – but no. No. There’s no reason not to open it at her desk. It’s just a letter from a friend. She gets those from time to time. And there’s nothing at all unusual about an Auror opening mail at their desk.

Newt has recently been involved in the greatest scandal to affect MACUSA in recent history, his letter could contain new, vital information – it’s positively a professional requirement that she open it immediately.

Tina bites at her lip, takes a steadying breath, then slides a letter opener under the wax ceil. It lifts in one perfect piece, which is pleasing – she’s tempted to try to preserve it, at least until she’s worked out what the badger means.

Inside the envelope are three tightly folded sheets of parchment, each one covered in text, front and back – and with them comes a stronger suitcase smell. He must have written this letter in his shed – it certainly smells like he stored the parchment there. Not that Tina lets herself linger over the familiar scent of Newt and his creatures for any longer than is strictly necessary.

And, scattered at random around the edges and between the paragraphs of Newt’s letter, there are drawings. Creatures, of course, some of which she recognises immediately – there’s a niffler, there’s a thunderbird – and some of which she can’t place. And he’s scratched out paw prints, too, and, at the bottom of the last page, under his name, the skyline of New York city.

Tina doesn’t let herself read immediately, just pours over the sheer abudance of Newt contained in the envelope: of course he has written her three double sided pages which he couldn’t even wait the entirety of his trip home before sending. Of course he has crammed all this parchment with his enthusiastic text, of course he has added illustrations, of course even the ink itself is beautiful, friendly, eccentric. She sniffs the edge of the topmost page again – then puts it down, before she makes a fool of herself.

_My dear Tina,_

_I do so hope that this letter finds you well and settling into things at MACUSA once more…_

Tina has to stop immediately and start again.

_My dear Tina_

What does that mean? ‘My’? _Dear_ would be perfectly acceptable alone, and would not be considered the term of endearment it would be in any other context, but to add ‘my’ to the front of it seems extraneous and thus _deliberate_ –

Mercy Lewis, she’s losing her mind.

Tina forces herself to read on.

_I hope that I am not being over-hasty in writing to you so soon, but I was reading in my cabin just now and discovered something I thought you might find amusing – did you know that your full name, Porpentina, is derived from the word ‘porpentine’, which is an antiquated term for a porcupine? Was that deliberate on your parents’ part? I find it rather marvellous, on either account. I confess that I found my own namesake, the humble newt, rather uninspiring in boyhood, but I’ve grown to appreciate him now – salamanders, both magical and otherwise, are fascinating creatures – although of course my full name is Newton, so entirely unrelated to our amphibious little friends._

Under this paragraph is a porcupine, standing upright and holding what must be a newt, although it’s difficult to tell because the ink has been smudged somewhat in transit.

Tina swallows a surge of affection at the images – they’re small but detailed, sketched with obvious care and Newt’s dry good humour – the porcupine looks faintly surprised by the presence of the newt in its paws, the newt in the process of leaping at its face.

But is this all he’s writing to tell her? That he thinks her name is ‘marvellous’, that he discovered what it meant and hoped to make her laugh by writing to her about it? What does that mean?

There aren’t any more helpful clues in the rest of his letter, either – it’s full of anecdotes about life on the steamer, his conversations with the ‘muggles’, as he calls them, his observations of a pod of dolphins that swam in the steamer’s wake the evening he wrote to her, and news about his own various creatures. Apparently the niffler escaped again and Newt had to fish it out of some unsuspecting lady’s underwear drawer.

He makes it all sound funny – enchanting, even – in his own whimsical way, even though Tina is certain that had she been there to witness the inevitable chaos of such an escapade she wouldn’t have found it funny at all. Really Newt shouldn’t be telling her about such things, he was probably still in American waters when they happened.

But she doesn’t know for certain that he was, so she supposes she can extend the benefit of the doubt.

He signs the letter _Yours, Newt_

Very simply, and he has had to cram his name in small letters around his sketch of the New York skyline. _Yours_. Tina turns the word over on the tip of her tongue, repeats it until it loses all meaning and becomes a sound as strange as any that one of his creatures could produce.

_Yours. Yours. Yours_.

She’s being silly again.

She stows the letter in her top desk drawer and is very proud of herself for only peeking at it twice throughout the rest of the day.

“Isn’t it perfectly obvious why he would send you this sort of letter?” Queenie is perusing the pages over Tina’s shoulder on their sofa, late that night, her knees drawn up under her dressing gown, nursing a mug of cocoa, “he misses you.”

“He can’t miss me, he barely knows me.”

“That’s not true. I think he misses you desperately – why else would he send you three pages telling you practically every detail of his life since you parted?”

Tina considers, sipping from her own mug. Queenie isn’t wrong – she rarely is, though Tina tries not to think about that often because Queenie is quite pleased enough with herself as it is – Newt has essentially sent her an account of everything notable that has happened to him since he got on the steamer to go home. Her rational, investigative brain can draw a number of conclusions from that, and the strong possibility that he’s telling her these things simply because he wants her to know, wishes he was there to tell them to her in person, is high on the list.

A far less rational part of her brain is sick with panic at the very idea.

Misses her. How? Why? What sort of mistake has Newt Scarmander made that he would believe her to be someone so worthy of his enthusiasm? She practically got him killed –

“Now don’t be ridiculous!” Queenie interrupts her train of thought with a frown, “he’s made no mistake at all. He’s made a perfectly sound choice, if you ask me.”

Tina bites at her lip, anxiously. “It’s only – what am I to send him in return?”

“What do you want to send him?”

“I have no idea.”

Queenie raises an eyebrow at her sister. “Oh really?”

“Don’t!” Tina clamps her hands over her ears, forcing Queenie out of the part of her mind that had just drifted, however accidentally, to a somewhat obscene place. “Mercy Lewis!”

Queenie giggles. “I think it’s sweet. You’re ever so taken with him. And he seems so taken with you. Just think – you’d have such tall children. Red heads!”

“Would you not go getting so far ahead of yourself!” Tina shakes her head, exasperated. “I can’t write like he can – if I sent him three pages about my day it’d put him to sleep. How do I reply to this?”

“Well you don’t have to reply right away!” Queenie shrugs, “or at all – you can let a fella chase you a little, you know.”

“ _You_ can,” Tina rolls her eyes, “I’m not exactly the kind of girl guys chase around after, Queenie.”

“Well that just proves that you’ve never met a man with such good taste as Newt,” Queenie taps the letter, “he spends his life chasing after magical creatures, right? Why would you be any different?”

Tina snorts, though a small part of her is pleased by the idea. Sweet, gentle, brilliant Newt casting his eye over her and finding her worthy of – _pursuit_.

She folds the letter back into its envelope and stows it in the cigar tin where she keeps her wand permit and birth certificate and her parents’ wedding rings.

She folds  the thought of Newt up, too – stows it somewhere in the back of her head, where it feels safe to dwell on alone, in the dark and safety of her own bed.  Here, she won’t have to admit to her daytime self how tantalising the possibility of him is – how tempting the idea of Newt is, rushing into her life like some sort of spell, touching everything she’s ever thought about herself and tipping it all slightly off its axis.

Tina can’t pin point exactly where the strength of the attraction lies – which is much of the source of her discomfort – it so defies analysis that she can’t label it, control it, keep its influence in her life to a minimum –  except that for a very short period, even amongst the chaos of her time with Newt, she had felt… seen.

And she thinks maybe, perhaps, she had seen Newt, too. Clearer than she’d ever seen anyone before.

+++  
  
Tina receives two more letters in quick succession before anything happens that she feels she can reply to Newt with. Slightly shorter missives no less charming than the first, they’re full of more details of the trip home, and then the news that he has arrived in London with all of his creatures intact. One page of this letter looks faintly chewed around the edges, where apparently a moon calf took it out of his pocket to teethe on it.

Both are signed again with that infernal word. _Yours._

Tina folds these letters into the cigar tin, too.

Then, a stray hippogriff somehow makes its way to the edges of New York city and Tina is able to persuade Picquery to let her lead a team of auras to safely capture and release it back into its natural environment, rather than just letting someone execute the poor thing.

She’s rather proud of the achievement – not simply because she knows Newt would appreciate her saving the life of an innocent creature, but because it took a great deal of care and planning and just a little _chutzpah_ to get her plan past Piquery, let alone pull it off successfully. There’s something deeply satisfying about just getting to do her damn job as well as she knows she can.

She writes out four pages for Newt on the entire incident, and folds a newspaper clipping in with them for proof, complete with a small photo of the hippogriff in question. Then, after some consideration, she sketches out three thumbnails of how they did it, complete with arrows and labels – perhaps Newt will have advice as to how to be more efficient next time.

Not as charming as his illustrations, perhaps, but useful. To the point. A good, clear reason to write to him.

But she includes some details about how she and Queenie are doing, anyway. Just in case he’s interested. She tells him that Jacob has recently opened a bakery and seems to be doing well, though she leaves out the part where she is certain that Queenie has begun to visit him there – she doesn’t want to commit that to paper, just in case the letter is intercepted somewhere.

She begins the letter _Dearest Newt_. And signs it simply _Tina_. And she reads all four pages over a hundred times, at least, before she’s satisfied. It must take her nearly a week, drafting and redrafting.

Then, on an impulse she can’t explain, she adds a doodle of a porcupine, and a newt. They’re kinda rough compared to how he draws, but she thinks maybe Newt’ll like them.

Then she sticks the letter in an envelope and hands it off to a mail owl before she can panic and change her mind.

+++  
  
He’s utterly late, of course – he’s always late – but Newt pauses long enough on his way out of the door to pick up the post, and scratch the delivery owl under her beak for her trouble. The owl’s name is Phyllis, she’s been delivering post to his home for five years and she’s very efficient – Newt’s almost certain she’s pleased to see that he’s returned home after so long away. He must be the only one of the wizards on her route who bothers to thank her for her work.

He’s still flipping through missives from his father, from the ministry, from the bank, from his publisher – when he spots an American postmark.

Tina’s letter is the most absurdly Tina-ish artefact that Newt could possibly have envisaged. He very nearly crashes into a tree on his broom he’s so absorbed by it on the way into London.

He stumbles through the meeting he’s a half hour late for – Flourish and Blots, arranging some sort of press thing for the publication of _Fantastic Beasts_ , which all sounds like a bit of a ridiculous faff but they’re paying him handsomely so he won’t complain. He’s hopeful that he’ll be able to use the fee for the press tour to bankroll another trip to South America off the back of it (…with, perhaps, a stop in New York on the way there and back).

He finds his way into a tea shop in Diagon Alley as soon as he’s released, and sits back down with Tina’s letter to read it again, thumbing through her neat, blocky handwriting for any detail he might have missed on his broom.

Of course she leaves any real information about herself till the very last – three pages on the rescue of a hippogriff that she clearly engineered rather wonderfully, but does not give herself real credit for; one page on Queenie and Jacob; and then a few lines on herself in a narrow margin at the very bottom. Next to the outline of – is that a porcupine?

Of course it is.

Newt touches the drawing with his little finger, awed.

She had liked his drawings, then. He was a little worried she’d just think they were silly. But he’d erred on the side of hoping they’d amuse her, just a little. Tina strikes him as someone who doesn’t get quite enough amusement in her daily life.

He’s already composing half a dozen replies in his head on the way home.


End file.
